Welcome to XOXO, Popverse! Our Valentines gift to you this year is a week-long celebration of all things love and romance in pop culture, from our favorite couples to which superheroes would make the worst dates. (It's the X-Men.) Find our love notes to you right here. 

The love affair between Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mister Spock is a powerful thing for fans who believe in what might be the first fandom slash relationship of the modern era — after all, Star Trek invented fandom as it currently exists half a century ago, for all intents and purposes. But how real is the love affair between the two ostensibly straight Star Trek characters? The answer is more complicated than you might expect, at least according to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

“I definitely designed it as a love relationship,” Roddenberry was quoted as saying in the 1975 book Star Trek Lives! He went on, “And I hope that for men […] who have been afraid of such relationships […] that they [Spock and Kirk] would encourage them to be able to feel love and affection, true affection… love, friendship and deep respect. That was the relationship I tried to draw. I think I also tried to draw a feeling of belief that very few of us are complete unto ourselves. It’s quite a lovely thing… where two halves make a whole.”

In the 1979 book Where No Man… The Authorized Biography of William Shatner, Roddenberry arguably went further, suggesting the two characters were in love with each other, albeit platonically. “ There's certainly some of that [closeness between Kirk and Spock], certainly with love overtones. Deep love,” he said in response to the suggestion that the two characters mirror Alexander the Great and longtime companion Hephaistion. “The only difference being, the Greek ideal ... we never suggested in the series ...physical love between the two,” he continued, adding, “We certainly had the feeling that the affection was sufficient for that, if that were the particular style of the 23rd century.”

So, if Roddenberry was to be believed, Kirk and Spock certainly loved each other, if not lovers, per se. But while he was willing to entertain the thought in interviews, he was nonetheless unwilling to go there canonically. The closest Roddenberry ever came to doing so was in the 1979 novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which he wrote, adapting the screenplay of the movie by Harold Livingston.

In an aside attributed to Kirk, a footnote in the book reads, "I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years.”

So, now you have it: Kirk and Spock may love each other, but they could never be together because Kirk not only prefers women, but more importantly, isn’t patient enough to wait for Spock’s Pon Farr to kick in... but at the very least, the shipping of the two is canon in Star Trek - enough so that both men have heard about it. 

Space may be the final frontier, but there's no end to Popverse's love of the Star Trek universe. Hop aboard the starship Enterprise with our Star Trek watch order, explore strange new worlds with our upcoming Star Trek TV shows and movies list, seek out the new life of the franchise, and boldly go where no Star Trek film has ever gone before - with Quentin Tarantino?